The author of Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness here heads out into the rarely explored worlds of the office, the factory, the fishing fleet, and the logistics center, his ears and eyes open to the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Lucid and insightful, Alain de Botton's "song for occupations" is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life that is all too often ignored and yet as central to us as our love lives.